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You got that right - there is no point, but not for the reasons you specify.

If you RTFTA you'd see that this is nothing more than a glorified WebDAV directory. The functionality they're talking about is something we've been using for freaking ever with Apache/Mod_SSL/WebDAV. We routinely read, write, and save documents to and from anywhere in the world collaboratively with other people in the office, with the server being an old P3 Desktop too old and slow to work as a desktop anymore running CentOS for free with the above configuration hosted on the company Internet Connection.

Works a champ. I don't have any idea why they think this is in any way relevant.

"Shouldn't that go to RHEL?"

From CentOS's website:

"CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor."

So, indirectly, it is RHEL. And I guess "prominent North American" would narrowed it down to two companies. But I don't see why they just flat out say RHEL.

You know that CentOS is a completely free version of Red Hat, don't you? There's no subscription or any other charge involved and you get all the updates that Red Hat packages, normally only a day or so later than Red Hat releases them.

As of version 5, Red Hat has (thankfully) dropped up2date and replaced it with Yum. I think even Red Hat themselves hated up2date.

As for why people use up2date - speaking for myself, because it's the only was to use the Red Hat Network (RHN) for pre-RHEL5 systems. We have a local RHN proxy server which connects via VPN from Australia to our RHN satellite server in Germany and allows us to test all patches before rolling them out for worldwide release. You can't get that kind of "enterprise" management from Debian/Ubuntu - most businesses may not need it, but the large financial institution I work at certainly does and is happy to pay for it.

If you ask Oracle - they didn't fork it. They are just offering support and patches to RHEL - and pulling out all the proprietary RH stuff so that they can put it out there themselves, at least that is how I understand it.

"All the proprietary RH stuff" is just some trademarked logos and occurrences of the literal string "RedHat". That's about the only difference between RHEL and CentOS.

The Linux-Watch article you linked to doesn't make sense, either:

The database giant claims that Red Hat only provides bug fixes for the latest version of its software. Thus, Oracle executives say, this often requires customers to upgrade to a new version of Linux software to get a bug fixed. Oracle's new Unbreakable Linux program, on the other hand, will provide bug fixes to future, current, and back releases of Linux. In other words, Oracle will provide the same level of enterprise support for Linux as is available for other operating systems.

If they'd done even the slightest bit of research, they could have compared that to RedHat's claims of seven years of maintenance. If they wanted to do actual journalism, they would have pressed Oracle for specific examples of times RedHat has fallen through on that promise and (if they'd given any) seen what RedHat has to say in their defense. As far as I've seen, RedHat's support is as good as advertised.

RHEL5 shipped March 14th, 2007. Why not compare it's errata?

I wouldn't count any updates released on 3/14 against RHEL5 on it's ship date - It's a perfect example of how OSS works and how fast patches are available. RH wanted to ship a stable version and didn't want to through last-minute patches into the install routine. What's the first thing you do when you install a new OS? You run the tool for online updates. So on day one 19 patches were available for all the bugs that had popped up since the version freeze to produce RHEL5.

Since 3/14, there have been 42 updates to RHEL-WS5. 11 of them have been after the 90-day mark, so that leaves you with 31 defects in the first 90 days of RHEL-WS5. That's also not using the "reduced" method to match feature-for-feature what Vista has.

However, I think the point is still always going to be that you can't have totally bug-free sofware. But it's how fast are bugs found and fixed. That's what Microsoft can't touch. How long do bugs go unreported so someone can take advantage of them on MS OS? Even once reported, how long do they linger? The same is simply not true for any critical bugs found in OSS.

But it is nice to see MS finally taking security seriously. They've only been trying to do that for 5 years with their Trustworthy Computing Initiative. Why not compare Windows 2003 Server stats, since it was released after the Trustworthy Computing Initiative? 6 months showed 38 defects. If you compare RHEL5 with just the same installed features to match WS2003 in 3 more months, I wonder how it will fair?

Of course, Microsoft had the NSA help them with Vista, which proves again that the more eyes you have on the source code, the better ;-p

I'll stick with CentOS myself... all the benefits of RHEL without the support fee costs.

apparently my choice was wise. can trust these people.

RedHat is definitely one of the good guys. While Google's Evil-o-meter has been slipping of late, RedHat has consistently been true to their mission. They develop technology that's open and freely available a-la CentOS and have some of the finest hacks around working full time on open stuff. (Alan Cox, et al)

RedHat tends to get dissed around here a bit because they target servers rather than workstation/desktop Linux. They are focused on making money the honorable way, and some people seem to have problems with anybody making money.

But look at their track record. They've consistently been true to the spirit and purpose of the GPL and free or open source software in general, and have been both profitable and successful in doing so. (Hint: Ubuntu is not yet profitable)

Too true, anyone can fork off Redhat, see: CentOS. Full RedHat built off of source repositories, but without any trademarked items.

I have found Xen to be pretty primitive compared to VMWare.. setup is a pain

That's what I thought, too. Until I installed CentOS (*the* RedHat Advanced Server clone). Start virt-manager, click Create, click next-next-finish and voila, you have a window showing an installation.

You're right, but businesses distrust open source for deeper reasons than that. With proprietary software, if it changes in a way which angers paying customers, you know it will change back since the company that sells it will be under pressure. You can't rely on that with free software - the maintainers may decide to change it in a way they feel is better but inconveniences you the user. Now if you're a programmer, you could just fork it. But if you're a manager you're screwed.

With something widely used, most changes will anger other people first, so you don't even need to threaten the vendor, just leave updates on. You also know the upsides and downsides before you use it too, and you can pay someone who's install it in a way that satisfied other customers.

Free software is different. It changes quickly, and there's no guarantee you'll be able to find someone who will support the new version. Or even the old version. There's free support on the mailing lists and via email, but the culture there may come as a shock if you're the sort of manager that fixes problems by yelling at the vendor until they fix them

Now I can see Jerry Taylor is the customer from hell, but if he ranted this way to a commercial vendor would they be as rude as this? Would they put the whole conversation on the web?

Dell will also establish a services and marketing program to migrate existing Linux users who are not Dell Linux customers to Suse Linux, Microsoft said.

I wish CentOS had an RHN-like feature, but I guess I'll have to build one or see if someone already did.

Do you mean like yum?

We use Cent where I work. There's a special "Server" CD that strips out pretty much everything that's not a major requirement. I think they're taking the same path that Microsoft has with Windows: you put one version on the server, and another version on the client, and it's all tested to work very well together. In that respect, Compiz on the client might be considered a feature.

I think that "Server" CD is something your company created. RedHat split RHEL5 into "Server" and "Client" repositories, but CentOS 5 combined them into a single repository, as CentOS 4 did before. So "Server" or "Client" is just a choice of which packages you install.

Where I work, we've created kickstarts for several configurations - development workstations for a couple different teams, basic server, server with RAID. They're minor differences, and in fact I'm switching our configs to be all generated from one file through gpp. As of last night, you can get a CentOS 5 machine by booting our CD, typing workstation-x86_64 name=foo, and waiting half an hour. At some places, you don't even need to put in a CD - you can use pxelinux to boot off the network.

Well, if you want to be a red hat beta tester, that's up to you. I mean, I want to be a Ubuntu beta tester, but in order to become one I had to edit my apt-sources and s/edgy/feisty/ and do a dist-upgrade. All Fedora users are beta testers.

If you don't like Fedora, don't forget that it's not the only free-as-in-beer RedHat system. My servers run CentOS, which is essentially RHEL recompiled. I don't have "shitpiles of money", but I still use a solid system that RedHat built. The only practical difference is that I don't have a guaranteed support channel. Are you suggesting that I should get that without paying them money? How would RedHat be able to pay the engineers who write so much software? And Ubuntu doesn't have that sort of support - should they be held to a different standard?

• ...is a great abstraction layer for iptables, so writing your firewall policies and rules is more like writing them in English* than straight iptables (although you'll still want to understand iptables enough to debug problems);
• ...uses a modular config, including "macros" for commonly-used rulesets;
• ...allows you to set arbitrary variables, like $WEBSERVER or $ALL_PRIVATE_NETWORKS, which make your rules all the more natural-language-like;
• ...gives you an elegant "did I just compose a firewall that's going to lock me out of the box?" sanity check ('shorewall safe-start' or 'shorewall safe-restart');
• ...offers excellent advanced features like multi-ISP use and integration of bandwidth shaping (using 'tc') in a satisfyingly-straightforward way;
• ...and manages to put firewall admins "on rails" without sacrificing advanced capabilities (see above).

* I have no experience with its internationalization.

No, I'm not on the Shorewall devel team. ;-)

It's just a set of scripts, so it should run on any system that offers iptables and an sh-compatible shell. There are prebuilt packages ("noarch" RPMs, for instance) maintained for most major distros.

Coupled with Webmin (for which there is a Shorewall module available) and add-ons like OpenVPN, Squid, and DansGuardian, this makes for a pretty capable "edge box" that even "non-Unixy types" can manage, provided they understand the OS-independent aspects of firewall management...

(No, I'm not on any of those devel teams, either.)

Let me be the first to say I'm very very very excited about this milestone and look forward to the first stable release of CentOS version 5.0 so us cheapskates can enjoy it as well.

CentOS 5 (Beta) for i386 and x86_64 is released:
http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/ 2007-March/013617.html

CentOS 5 Beta is out already: CentOS 5 (Beta) for i386 and x86_64 is released http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-announce/ 2007-March/013617.html

There is no limit on downloading the source. When you buy RHEL, you buy the *binaries* and you buy support. The GPL explicitly allows charging for binaries. You are even allowed to charge "reasonable" media fees for source, but Red Hat very kindly makes the source free as in beer. You can compile the source yourself, or let http://centos.org/ do it for you.

The GPL is about *freedom*, not price. RHEL gives you full freedom. And while you can't get official RHEL binaries for free, derivatives based on the source are available that are free as in beer.

While an individual or small business has little reason to buy RHEL, an enterprise has good reasons. You get a highly stable platform with security patches for a long period of time. You get support. You get someone to blame when things go wrong. As an individual, you might want to try Centos and get familiar with it. You never know when you might want to work for an enterprise that uses RHEL. As a small business, you can start out with Centos, and if your business takes off, scale right up to RHEL with minimal hassle.

Freaking Easy.

I just downloaded Centos 4.4 and just fell in love. I like debian, but RedHat really has a nice polished product here.

PS - Just in case, Centos 4.4 is the same as RedHat ES 4.4, just recompiled from sources.

Red Hat kindly makes SRPM's available, so yes you could download RHEL for free. You would have to build the system yourself.

Thankfully, others have already done that and made the results available, for instance CentOS

I can't understand why you're trying to get the design tools that are certified against RHEL 3 and 4 to work in Fedora! Why not use CentOS? It's free and is a near-identical clone of RHEL (only differences are any references to Red Hat and its logos, both of which are trademarked). And, yes, you can install binary kernel drivers intended for RHEL onto equivalent CentOS machines without any compatibility issues.

It should be noted that there are third-party projects to add the flexibility and newer versions you want, like CentOS Plus (includes PHP 5, Postgres 8, MySQL 5, and others) and PyVault (Python 2.4).

By looking at the release dates of CentOS 4.x and comparing them to the release dates of RHEL 4.x, it looks like we can expect to see CentOS 5 released on 28th March 2007.

The two weeks lead time would appear to be borne out by this CentOS FAQ entry.

Therefore, take your time, revisit your decision and, in the end, you'll end up with a lot lower software and maintenance costs, running on older equipment with only a few viruses and malware knocking at your door.

Perhaps you should have followed his advice and Googled it instead. He's talking about huge circular dependency trees like these that thwart your attempts to install a single small package. Or would your advice be to install all five of those packages at once? If you follow the thread it turns out that some of the dependencies are bogus: an all too common problem with RPM's where the spec writer either doesn't know what the dependencies really are, or doesn't care, or doesn't understand the spec file format.

• mOnOwall - firewalling
• IPCop - firewalling
• Metadot - CMS
• Apache - web server
• Bind - Name Server
• asterisk - telephony/voip
• Sendmail - cussed but stable MTA
• SpamAssassin - spam filtering
• MIME-Defang - email content filtering/manipulation
• ClamAV - Virus filtering
• Freebsd - the best OS since sliced bread (IMHO)
• Centos - Not to shabby an OS either
• ...

Or, you could skip the whole Windows XP/Vista issue, and install your favorite GNU/Linux distro. Seriously. I'm using CentOS, and it work very well.

You can find a solution(s) to your problem at one or more
of the following locations:

http://www.centos.org

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/

http://en.opensuse.org

http://www.opensolaris.org/

http://www.ecomstation.com/

http://www.redhat.com

http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html

http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/

http://www.openbsd.org/

http://www.freebsd.org/

http://www.netbsd.org/

http://www.dragonflybsd.org/

http://www.osfree.org/doku/en:start

http://www.skyos.org/

http://www.freeos.com/

http://www.minix3.org/

Added to bypass the stupid slashdot lameness filter which apparently doesn't like a post full of links. WTF is wrong with the
stupid lameness filter? Jeez, what does it want, for us to type paragraphs of meaningless drivel just to get past the lameness filter?
Sheeesh. OK, this is really stupid. Why don't ajfajf al;djal a fa fa lkdf jaa fal ja;ljf af af ajf;lajf alfjalf a fjal;fjafl; jaflakjf af;laj
jalkfaj fjf af af fajjjajal jajfa f afjdlakej2233 2235t2352 dsfalkfjal f 222j2 afdkja f23 2 2 2t2352322 233252352 2323232.

For most /. users, this is not going to work as a desktop replacement. But for most general office workers, this can and does work.

I don't have much experience using Windows as a terminal server. What I do have is experience using CentOS Linux as a terminal server, with HP thin clients on the desktop. It works phenomenally well.

The thin clients themselves cost about $350 a pop in small quantities, closer to $300 a pop if you do a mass migration. You put some of your funds into nice displays, but most of your funds into the back end server. Lots of cores, lots of RAM, very fast disk. Plan on replacing it every 2-3 years with newer faster hardware.

The vast majority of the users will be idling the processors most of the time, so long as you disable fancy screen savers and other CPU-wasters on the central terminal server. Depending on what kind of hardware you use on the back end, you could potentially have hundreds of office workers happily working with one back end server. Honestly, though, I think the ideal way to go would be with something like an IBM pSeries box with a bunch of department level LPARs so you don't have one department hogging resources and crapping all over everyone else.

The thin clients can boot off a local read-only flash drive, but better yet have them boot off a tftp server so you can more easily keep their software levels up to date.

X11 has been doing this stuff for ages. The technology is pretty mature. :) Though I am not thrilled with the security, nor am I thrilled with the state of remote audio in X11. Those are the two big caveats I would warn you of if you're considering something like this.

Other than those issues, I have been thrilled with the technology. It's an idea that was pushed out there before the technology was ready before. Now the hardware has caught up with the concept. It's worth another look now.

I would guess it would be extremely rare for any of Red Hat's enterprise customers to let their subscription lapse and run non-updated & non-supported RHEL products.

And even if Red Hat did something like this, all these former customers would have to do is drop in CENTOS or one of the other recompiled clones of RHEL.

The grandparent's premise is ludicrous. Red Hat makes money by selling support, not software.

Although I use VMWare for Win2K, if you don't want to pay for VMWare Workstation, you can use MS's VirtualPC for free while supplies last.

Just out of curiosity, why are you running Fedora on your servers?

Use RHEL instead. If you don't have the budget, a clone (like CentOS or Whitebox) will perform just as well, but won't have the paid-for support. The version stability of code is there, and you won't have to re-learn how to manage the box. The version of Exim included with RHEL 4 is 4.43. Out of date, but likely still supported... *shrug* At the very least, it comes complete with an exim.conf.

If you want code stability AND fresh software there are Contrib repositories for use with CentOS (see http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2005-May/ 005618.html for more info), which may very well have the software you are looking for. If not, you are unlikely to break anything by downloading the source and compiling (I took this route with OpenLDAP, as the RH supplied packages were woefully out of date).

For what it's worth, I feel your pain. Under my care are two RedHat 9, one Gentoo, one (seriously out of date) Debian and a whole host of CentOS 4 boxes. Admining the Gentoo box is painfully different. Thankfully, the Debian one is pretty much hands off.

Red Hat users might like CentOS. It is the free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (a.k.a. RHEL).

The appeal of CentOS is that it is extremely stable, and is supported for a very long time. It is designed for users who want to track security updates and major bugs, but who don't want to "upgrade" every year.

I've been a faithful RedHat/Fedora Core user for years, but obsolescence happens too fast for anything but test or playground machines these days, where you don't mind a complete reinstall every now and then.
Since I don't need RedHat's support, my servers now run CentOS, and everyhingthing else is on Ubuntu.

"entriprise then Cent--oh heck what's the entriprse fedora called?"

I think you are referring to CentOS, however I am fairly sure it isn't an "enterprise Fedora". It is a rebuild of RedHat Enterprise and aims to be 100% binary compatible with RedHat Enterprise. I am almost certain it is not affiliated with Fedora in any way.

This answer shows why the question is nonsensical on its face. No one can tell you what distro is best for you. Everyone has a different personality. For me, Slackware is the ideal distro for a newbie. But then, I like to read up on any product before I use it. So I thought it was easy to install and now it is very easy to administrate. It has lower overhead from all of the bells and whistles that some of the other distros have included. There is no dependency hell that can be so frustrating to a newbie. If you stay away from the auto updaters and read the changelogs, you will never have a broken system. If you are like a lot of the Windows users that come over to Linux, however, you will probably be better served by one of the other distros. The majority of them want to run the installer CD and then just have everything be set up and work. Of course some of them become so frustrated the first time they run into a problem and have no idea on how to fix it, they run back to Windows. But good luck to you.

Which distro to adopt if you are a newbie really depends on what you want to achieve or learn by installing Linux. If you want an alternate desktop system you could go for Ubuntu, Linspire, Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop distro where you get lots of user friendly GUI tools to solve your configuration problems. If your ambition is to become a corporate Linux admin or a developer and you want to build a server system to cut your teeth on I would recommend something like Centos because it is a free-of-charge binary 'clone' of Red Hat ES/AS which along with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is the standard for anybody who runs enterprise quality software including the ubiquitous Oracle Databases. Slackware on the other hand is only for you if you are a for true nerd, developer, comp-sci/engineering student or some such eccentric who want to find out the old fashioned way how a modern *NIX system is put together. Basically I'd say that if you are a complete Linux newbie, say... an experienced Windows XP user, you should definitely start with one of the ultra user friendly Linux desktop distributions and proceed from there. If you want to become a professional Linux admin you should also get over any fear you may have of command-line interfaces and doubly so if you have any ambition to do any serious development on a Linux system.

Try saying that about Debian Sarge, or about Gentoo, or even about Fedora Core without the proper drivers (which would fit a lot of ATI people...)

There are many distributions available with very simple install processes. CentOS, Ubuntu (or one of it's variants such as Kubuntu or Xubuntu) or any of many others. No one in their right mind is going to suggest Gentoo or anything Debian to an absolute beginner. As far as the driver issue goes, when was the last time you installed Windows (especially if you didn't take the side cover off the machine to see what it was you were going to have to go driver searching for). On the whole, Linux supports much more hardware out of the box than Windows currently does. At least with the desktop oriented distributions there is generally a decent 2D driver for almost all cards, be it VESA or one of the open source drivers so that you arent forced to do your driver searching in 640x480 256 color goodness :)

I do agree that there is still room for improvement and that a "driver installation wizard" framework would be really nice. I also agree that there should be some standardization with regard to where certain things reside (LSB was making some headway it seems, prior to the whole SCO fiasco scaring most of the members away). That said, I cannot remember the last time I had to resort to the command line to install drivers during an installation. The worst I have seen is the equivalent of the "press F6 to install SCSI/SATA drivers" one might have to resort to during a Windows installation to install network/SATA/SCSI drivers under Linux... and I am not limited to storing those drivers on a floppy disk either, the way I am with Windows.

Depends on which "Linux folks" you are talking about. There are two distributions which are notable for having long-term releases; releases that have 5+ year support cycles:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and its free clones (notably, CentOS). CentOS 3 is based on RedHat 9 released in 2003, and the last release was just a couple of months ago.
  
• Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. LTS means that Ubuntu will provide security updates for this platform for five years.
  

Except that Red Hat and Suse are not entirely open source.
What happens when MySQL depends on the closed part?

Huh? I didn't know this about RH (don't know anything about Suse). Is this really true? Wouldn't CENTOS have some serious problems in making a RHEL rebuild if there were some close source things in it?

Give us some examples please.

I have a laptop, not a desktop, and yes I don't turn it off. Mostly this is because I have Centos installed, and I haven't figured out how to configure either a hibernation method (via Dell's BIOS), low power modes, or a functioning suspend. So, I leave it on all the time. This is very annoying. I do get much better battery life with Windows.

Wake me up when the book has a chapter entitled "How Red Hat Software broke its covenant with the linux community" talking about how the supported stable free version of the software disappeared, to be replaced by a beta test program for RHEL.

There never was such a convenant, and RedHat releases all the source packages as required by the GPL. This means you can download a RHEL-based stable, free distribution recompiled by a third party in the form of CentOS. My company tends to buy RHEL where we want paid support or where we have to buy an operating system with hardware (Dell offers Windows or RHEL at the same price). We use CentOS elsewhere. It's the same software, and it's free and legal.

Many of us, myself included, were formerly RedHat users but we learned that they don't give a fuck about us when they shifted from free RedHat to Fedora, and haven't looked back since.

For a company that doesn't give a fuck about open source, they sure hire a lot of people to develop it. I can't find it now, but somewhere there's a webpage with a list of all the open source projects RedHat has developed, maintains, and contributes to. It's amazing how much they've given back to the community, and how many idiots like you there are who are deliberately blind to it.

Can someone please mod the parent down as a troll? And someone else please post a link to the page I can't find?

The root cause is that the GPL allows for the existence of non-free distros (Novell and RedHat are the ones I know)

Dude, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is provided as source at Red Hat's site. There is at least one large, easy to use distribution which takes those sources and rebuilds them after removing any Red Hat trademarked logos. That distribution is CentOS. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is completely free and GPL compliant. I recommend the contract-supported RHEL for customers that need that support, or need the certification on particular hardware for compliance issues and I recommend CentOS for customers that are comfortable dealing with (or paying me to deal with) a lot of extra issues.

Your statement that RHEL is non-free is thus completely false and demonstrably so.

Further RHEL, unlike SLES, is not complicated by an unclear patent-deal with Microsoft which seems to open Novell and Novell's customers to arcane legal threats due to implicit admission of the existence of infringement of Microsoft patents.

Add to this that Fedora Core is almost completely paid for by Red Hat in terms of infrastructure and developers and is also completely Free and I think that your comment if not a troll is unbelievably off-base.

At some point oracle should take a look at their own legal standpoint and community reputation (if Larry Ellison cares about that).
Some basic facts for people to be aware of:
1. Dubious rebuild practices: They seem to be using centos as a buffer to Red Hat. See http://oss.oracle.com/linux/legal/oracle-list.html and search for centos. If you really want to have some fun, grab the centos source, and start matching the typos in the centos patches against the 'oracle developed' patches in their source.
2. Dozens of bloggers and community members are already calling it a failure. see the following for your current opinion: http://ultramookie.com/wayback/2006/10/26/uncompat ible-linux/ http://ultramookie.com/wayback/2006/10/29/do-it-ri ght-oracle/ and http://thebs413.blogspot.com/2006/10/oracle-lookin g-past-ellisons-rhetoric.html

Oracle seems to be walking a very fine line with overall compliance with the GPL. They have taken some patches from centos and removed the user attribution.

Personally, CentOS http://www.centos.org/ has already proven to be a top notch alternative to RHEL, and while there's no indemnification, it works far better than oracle linux seems to at this point, and they provide more community support than oracle seems to want to.

all of the city office staff enjoyed the contest and the votes cast for all the decorated pumpkins was very close.

I have installed Fedora numerous times only to be disappointed with the number of bugs in a very obvious unfinished product. I know the latest release of Ubuntu has had its issues, but I haven't gone to it as I have been very pleased with Ubuntu LTS. It is the stable version comparable to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but it is available to all

I suspect that you will find CentOS to be of interest. Basically. this is RHEL with the trademarked and copyright stuff (e.g. logos) removed.

I am one of the people much like the GP who got burned by Red Hat during the RH9 to enterprise Linux conversion. I had just bought a (personal) subscription to show support for a company that I respected, which was canceled with no refund about 3 months into a year contract. This, unsurprisingly, left a very bad taste in my mouth.

However, all is not lost for those who prefer a Red Hat style distribution that is stable rather than the Fedora line. I am currently extremely happy with CentOS, a community rebuild of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux line. I never used Red Hat's support other than for updates and now I find that I prefer yum over up2date for updates anyway. I would also like to take a hat off to the KDE-RedHat and RPMForge projects, who provide many of the packages that RH is lacking; especially in the area of desktop support.

My point here is that while I was an avid supporter of Red Hat, I have found that with Linux I am not tied to a single vendor and in fact, my experience is exactly the opposite. The only one losing here is Red Hat because I no longer buy support from them.

If you are running a server, are familiar with Red Hat, and don't want to spend the money on a RHEL license, then install CentOS. It is a rebuild of the RHEL source RPMs. Very stable, very nice. I use it on my personal servers and FC on my desktop. FC is in far too much flux to ever be a stable server platform (in my opinion). http://www.centos.org/

Tuttle Oklahoma perhaps?